Expanded Horizons

Linda Mannheim’s second collection of stories, This Way to Departures, is appropriately titled. All the stories in Mannheim’s début, Above Sugar Hill (2014), were bound to a specific site: the ethnically mixed, economically deprived neighbourhood of Washington Heights in Manhattan, hemmed in by the Hudson River on one side and the Harlem River on the other. Set mostly between the 1970s and 1990s, Above Sugar Hill is an assured evocation of a very particular time and place — the streets of Mannheim’s youth, in an era of “squalor” and “brutality” — although it lacks the dexterity of style with which it might have offset the feeling that some of its stories are hobbled by the limited horizons of the locale. In This Way to Departures, however, Mannheim embraces a broader canvas and takes a bolder approach to the form of the short story. Although the new book still retains connections to Washington Heights, the action here extends across the United States, down into South America, and even briefly overseas to Europe, and there are comparatively more formal innovations and provocations. As a whole, the collection reads like the work of an increasingly ambitious and confident writer, striking off in a range of new directions.